


inside jokes (with yourself)

by Wrennydennydoo



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014), Big Hero 6: The Series (Cartoon)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Karmi deserves way better, an insight into the mind of my favorite underrated character, honestly we've all been there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 04:48:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16695727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrennydennydoo/pseuds/Wrennydennydoo
Summary: People are hard to deal with. They sound like spite, and spite has always been her primary motivator.





	inside jokes (with yourself)

Karmi isn’t stupid. 

 

Ok. Well. That’s debatable. When she says it to herself every morning in the mirror, “ _ I am Not Stupid _ ,” it doesn’t sound like she’s trying to convince herself; it sounds like she’s trying to convince the ten-year-old boys she used to play Fortnite against. It sounds like an argument that she never won, one where the crowd she chanted at yelled back louder each time. It sounds like the time she said  _ “well, fuck you, then”  _ on a minecraft server and got kicked off because the mods didn’t care about what you said, so long as you used appropriate language. The  words “ _ I am Not Stupid _ ” sounds like the time she told her parents she wanted to go into Science (age seven, thinking above her normal grade level, disconnecting from her peers) and having her father laugh at her and tell her that Science was for Men, right before her mom divorced him.

 

They sound like spite, and spite has always been her primary motivator. 

 

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She’s improved life-saving medical technology on spite. She studies bacteria and thinks about how she could use them, engineer them, make their architecture more sound. They are tiny cathedrals, and without spite she would not know them. But then, it does make it hard to read other people if you also assume they’re motivated by spite, and it turns out that they’re….not. Bacteria are much easier than people. Nearly anything is easier than people, thank you very much.

 

Which is why she struggles with Professor Granville assigning her a, well, babysitting duty would probably be the best word for it-- but, the spite thing. Spite tends to alienate people, as she expected it would Hiro Hamada, the metaphorical baby in question. They’re supposed to spend lab-time together and  _ learn _ from each other, as if the two youngest students at the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology would even want to associate with each other, ever. 

 

Karmi just wants to be left alone. She doesn’t need some loser kid being her backpack for a week. She expects him to be awful too, someone she has to shout “ _ I am Not Stupid” _ at, just like she had to convince the staff that she was worth their time and effort, like she had to convince the student body to treat her as a student and not a dumb kid. Nothing against kids. Kids are great. But Karmi has been able to understand calculus since fifth grade. Karmi and kids lack stuff to talk about. 

 

So the unexpected thing happens when the kid Hiro tries to interact to her even after she’s kinda terrible to him. Because he has some kind of report he has to fill out and turn in at the end of the week, and she thought that they had come to the mutual and silent agreement that he could BS his way through it, but nope. Hiro actually wants to legit do it. 

 

Wild. 

 

As it turns out, Hiro isn’t completely awful. He is. A little bit. But he’s persistent, even when she’s mean, and keeps trying to be  _ nice _ , which is so alien that Karmi doesn’t even know how to react. So she doesn’t. She keeps going with her work, realizes that kid Hiro is decently intelligent, and elects to ignore that fact. He’s a kid. 

 

The end of the week comes, and Hiro presents the report to Professor Granville, and to Karmi’s surprise. Not a single thing in that report is a lie. It sounds like the normal ‘oh yeah it was great, totally absorbed a lot of information, I really learned from this experience’, etc, except Hiro completely skirts around the fact that there was minimal human interaction involved. There isn’t anything terrible about Karmi in it, but nothing… nothing glowingly suckuppish, either, which is what she had expected. The report sounds weirdly legit, instead of over-the-top wonderful, and it has stuff that actually happened, like them arguing over the applications of robotics in the medical field.

 

She hates him, a little, for that. Manipulating his report to sound normal, instead of terrible and spiteful. (Hates herself for summing up his existence to ‘child’ instead of student.) 

 

People are hard, and Karmi is spiteful. 

 

She finds herself where she normally does, at a café on campus near her dorm. Obsessing over something non-relevant so she doesn’t have to think about stuff she probably should think about. 

 

This week her obsession is Big Hero Six. A group of SanFran superheroes?  _ Awesome.  _ They make the part of her that loves Spiderman comic books light up with  _ joy _ **_,_ ** because holy mother. That’s so friggin’ cool they make her want to let go of her self-enforced aversion to cursing. What it must be like, being able to help people and fly and spit flames out of one’s mouth and run so fast no one could possibly catch you. Being so tight-knit that you and your friends go out and decide to make SanFran a better place. Someone literally having your back. 

 

There are six in the group, which is such an aesthetically pleasing number in itself that Karmi loves them before she knows that they’ve rescued a coma patient from a weird sci-fi vortex thing from an experimental science project that shut down a decade ago. Karmi loves their armor designs. Karmi loves that they start being seen all over the city, that they clearly communicate with each other and know each other, that they all seem to have the same origin story. That the two most coolest members are Tall Girl and Speed Queen (ok, yeah lame names, she knows. But they haven’t really been officially named by anyone, and who better but her.) 

 

Represent, ladies. 

 

Originally her pet project starts as a self-insert crack fic. Karmi knows she isn’t the best writer, but it’s irresistible. And it doesn’t need to be good to be funny. Sometimes the bad punctuation and run-on sentences can be charming when used correctly. 

 

So sue her. She gives them all stupid names and stupid catchphrases and make them save her from a burning building, because at least Karmi’s fiction she has cool female characters that help save her and a cool superhero boyfriend. And she posts the first chapter, and wishes that she could be their friends. Because that’d be  _ awesome _ . It’s easy to have friends in stories, instead of spite. 

 

And if Hiro Hamada notices and it annoys the heck out of him, well. Unexpected bonus. Maybe. For some reason it gets under his skin. And that makes her uncomfortable, too, because what does he care about her stupid writing? He doesn’t even understand it, what self-insert crack is. It’s designed to be hilariously bad. And there she goes, thinking about it again. It’s not any of his business. It’s just a joke, her joke with herself. 

 

If Hiro would understand it, maybe it’d be a joke between both of them. But he doesn’t, and he probably won’t ever. There are only so many similarities two geniuses can share. 


End file.
